Latest industry views and advice

If you’re a B2B marketer looking for content marketing and strategy, you’ve been born at the right time.

For what was once an information and knowledge wasteland, seemingly stretching into infinity, is now a metaphorical verdant pasture of B2B content marketing and strategy expertise being shared in the open air!

And not before time is B2B catching up with its B2C cousin in terms of having best practice to share and generating genuine results for business.

CONTENT MARKETING AND STRATEGY DEFINED

While Pulizzi was clear that “you can’t have one without the other”, Brenner defined the territories as: content strategy = the why, who and how; content marketing = the what and when. “It needs a solid strategy and plan to manage content resources and development,” he added.

And, he emphasised the vital element of understanding what content means to a business and why strategy cannot be overlooked: “Content is an asset…strategy directs those assets to generate a return.”

With #cmworld being a Twitter chat, the knowledge and insight wasn’t limited to its hosts. When considering the first step firms should take in creating a content strategy there was a rich seam of thought from a variety of sources:

@JasonAplin: “It’s a conversation not a sales pitch…you don’t matter, they do.”

@ardath421: “Develop buyer personas…otherwise how will you know who you’re creating content for or what they need?”

@Koozai_Cat: “Define how it ties to your brand principles and mission statement.”

B2B BUYERS ARE CONSUMERS TOO

These, and other views on B2B content strategy and marketing , are played out in another useful source for B2B Marketers, the responsys new school marketing blog. Its recent Q&A with Harriet Mitchell of RS Components – distributor of electrical, electronic and industrial components – crystallised much of what the #cmworld chat brought under the microscope:

Segmenting customers into buyer types and providing relevant information for each, i.e. sending a technology innovation blog to an engineer and a flexible pricing campaign to a buyer.

Not mass marketing, but relationship building.

Recognising that the B2B purchase is rarely an “impulse”, but that B2B buyers still wear a consumer hat and expect a “relevancy common in the retail world”.